I was the lead developer of 2 moderately successful browser games quite a few years back, and plan on working on a new game soon. At the time, I wrote them in pure PHP (no template engine or anything of the sort).
I'd like to start working on a new game, but have been out of the web development world for a while. Reading around, I hear a lot of good about Rails, Django, Node.js, etc., with which I have no experience (although I know my way around Python, Javascript, and the others quite well).
So my question is the following- if I were to go in my old ways and go with PHP again, would I be making things hard for myself? Would picking something more "trendy" have a real impact on my development?
In addition, does anyone have any pointers relating to specifically developing browser games with these more modern tools?